PROSECUTORS EXTRACT 700 PAGES OF ENCRYPTED MESSAGES FROM THE PHONE OF TRUMP LAWYER MICHAEL COHEN

[edpc]

Federal prosecutors investigating U.S. President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen have extracted more than 700 pages of messages sent using encrypted programs like WhatsApp and Signal on phones seized from Cohen, according to a court filing on Friday.

The prosecutors also said they had reconstructed 16 pages from the contents of a shredding machine taken during raids on Cohen’s home, office and hotel room in April. The prosecutors said in their filing in Manhattan federal court that they had turned the materials over to Cohen’s lawyers.

http://www.newsweek.com/prosecutors-extracted-thousands-encrypted-messages-phone-trump-lawyer-michael-980122

[edpc]

Jones and Cohen's attorneys have already reviewed an initial collection of data from two phones and an iPad. Jones ruled that out of 291,770 total items from those devices, "148 items are Privileged and/or Partially Privileged and that 7 items are Highly Personal." But an additional 315 megabytes of data have been pulled from the first of the two BlackBerries, and its contents were delivered to Cohen's attorneys on June 14. An unknown amount of data remains on the second BlackBerry.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/06/fbi-recovered-hundreds-of-encrypted-messages-from-michael-cohens-phone/


The amount of privileged and/or personal items on one device was 155 out of 291,770 total.  That's 0.00053%.  That doesn't sound good for Cohen.

[sneakypete]

How are they legally allowed to do this? Aren't conversations,but spoken and written,between a lawyer and his client exempt from search?

[edpc]

How are they legally allowed to do this? Aren't conversations,but spoken and written, between a lawyer and his client exempt from search?

The crime-fraud exception would nullify any privilege.  So far, it doesn't seem like there's much protected info.  Apparently, Cohen was more of a facilitator and bag man than attorney.

[Oceander]

How are they legally allowed to do this? Aren't conversations,but spoken and written,between a lawyer and his client exempt from search?

Yes, but apparently there were very few of those. 

[Restored]

Not if you are a Republican

[edpc]

Not if you are a Republican

Sure, because he worked on the Dukakis campaign, interned for Massachusetts Congressman Joe Moakley, voted for Obama in 2008, then registered as a Republican in March 2017 -  after the inauguration.